damn I’ve only drank more than two a day when I wanted to pull an allnighter in a lan party
Comment on elixir of a god
JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 days agoEven drinking two per day seems intense. I’d need to look at the caffeine content again, I think red bull is relatively less, like comparable to a coffee. But monster is a ton.
Gonzako@lemmy.world 3 days ago
BranBucket@lemmy.world 3 days ago
OBLIGATORY I’M NOT A DOCTOR DON’T TAKE THIS AS MEDICAL ADVICE FIRST.
Monster runs about 160-180 mg per can depending on variety. Coffee is about 80-120 per cup, depending on the bean and roast.
A 400-500 mg dose of caffeine daily is considered safe for most people according to Wikipedia. So 2-3 Monsters a day for a heavy caffeine user isn’t a crazy amount.
Now, when you look at Bing and Reign, which IIRC have around 350 mg per can, those numbers go up real fast, but you’re still not going to get close to the approximately ten grams of caffeine needed for it to be a lethal dose, you’d puke long before you got that much liquid in your stomach.
Also, the physical effects of caffeine abate over time. Users build up a tolerance fairly quickly, and it gets to the point that the twitchiness, elevated BP, and higher heart rate aren’t really present like they’d be for someone who doesn’t consume a lot of them. Again, paraphrasing Wikipedia here. So a moderate user probably isn’t on the verge of an infarction at all times, as the media seems to enjoy impling.
It’s mostly just soda pop with extra caffeine, and caffeine is bitter, so they jack up the sugar content to compensate. That’s a bigger issue IMO.
But overall, there are likely millions, if not billions of people who down two or three energy drinks daily and don’t drop dead. So while the caffeine numbers seem extreme, it’s really the sugar, artificial sweetners, and probably unhealthy lifestyle that goes with being a chronic user that will cause the most damage over time.